Aimei, Bao Hua, Ping Yong, Jeremy and I met up for lunch yesterday and then headed down to the National Museum to try and complete the tour we had started few weeks back of the entire Living History Gallery. Very luckily, it was the last day of the museum open house, so Bao Hua and Jeremy, both from NTU, were able to enter that particular gallery for free. 3 hours later, we were still unable to finish visiting everything inside the museum. That takes the total number of hours we've been in there 6 thus far.If you have not visited the National Museum, you should do so soon. I find it really fantastic and interesting. There are so many things and information that you can probably visit it numerous times and still find new things to look at and learn new stuff from each visit.
By sheer luck, we chanced upon this exhibition at the ground level - VOOM Portraits by Robert Wilson, part of the museum's Season of Photography. It is actually only free-of-charge to members and for public it's charged at a price of $5 to $10. However, because it was the museum's open house, we were able to get in for free.
The portraits utterly captured us. These are not ordinary paintings, but are video portraits with models standing almost still. Models include actors such as Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp, Chinese artist Zhang Huan, and animals like owls and dogs. These videos are shown on huge-ass televisions which, according to Jeremy, are extremely expensive and probably custom-made. Each portrait is also accompanied by music and for some also with spoken text. You can see the pictures of the portraits here.
"Drawing inspiration from movies, art and history, along with design, dance and contemporary popular culture, Robert Wilson has collaborated with his varied subjects to produce a groundbreaking series of videos called VOOM Portraits, to be exhibited for the first time in Asia.
Making their debut in Singapore, the video portraits are looped with no discernable beginning or end, running endlessly as a framed work of art, hence, resulting in the visitor mistaking them for still photographs. It is only through closer inspection that Wilson's heightened language of minimal movement, choreographed gesture and precise timing are revealed."
source
Robert Wilson coins a phrase accompanying the exhibition - A Still Life is a Real Life. I think it very nicely summarizes what is to be seen in this fantastic exhibition. In a way, like what Aimei says, it reaches out to the masses very easily, it is very easily understood and also open to interpretation, however you like it. Even if you are not into art, I suspect you might enjoy this exhibition anyway because it is fun watching the subtle and sometimes not so subtle movements of the models. In fact, my friends and I ended up wondering how they could stay in each position for so long (especially Johnny Depp - his hands are damn stable!), pointing out to each other the little details in each portrait and we took joy in visiting the other portraits and then returning to a previously visited one to find something about it has changed, whether the models' positions or the lighting.
I love the exhibition because now when I look at a portrait, I see life behind the stillness and it made me think of how it was made and how it was for the model, amongst many other things.
If you're interested, here are some of the details:
Venue: Exhibition Gallery 2 (ground level, underneath the staircase leading up)
Date: THU 30 OCT 2008 - SUN 4 JAN 2009
